Album of the Year 2017: #19 Slowdive – Slowdive

Shoegaze innovators Slowdive returned with a fantastic self-titled album in 2017, delivering another helping of blissful, intergalactic dream-pop. Their return more than lived up to the enormous legacy of the genre they helped pioneer, and comfortably blew all imitators out of the water.

The eight songs of Slowdive are laced in a sugary film of reverb, with each carefully placed chord, rhythm and note sounding out as if in an enormous echo chamber. The album feels spacious to the extreme, limitless even: the soupy production effortlessly fuses guitars and keyboards together into one almost indistinguishable whole, to wonderful effect. Slowdive envelops the ears in a way few albums do.

Which isn’t to say that the record is mellow, by any means – songs like ‘Star Roving’ and ‘Go Get It’ are among the loudest the band has ever recorded. The former builds a driving space-rock groove from multi-tracked guitars and harmonized vocals, while the latter feels a bit post-rock with an interesting quiet/loud dynamic, as whisper-quiet verses erupt into a huge chorus: ‘I wanna see it / I wanna feel it’…

For a band who hadn’t released any new music in over twenty years, Slowdive came back sounding full of confidence in 2017. Their new record was meticulous and panoramic: as delicate as a spider’s web, but as eternal as a galaxy. And certainly among the best of the year.